Aground Read online

  “There she is,” he said. It was the Dragoon.

  She was lying dead in the water, listing slightly to port, with her sails furled. They went over at a thousand feet, still losing altitude. Avery banked right to swing back. Ingram stared down to keep her in view, conscious of Mrs. Osborne’s face touching his and her hand digging into his shoulder. She was clutching the binoculars in her other hand, trying to bring them to bear on the schooner’s deck. He slid out of the seat, pushed her into it, and stood behind her. The schooner was momentarily lost to view then as Avery lengthened the radius of his turn. When they straightened out at last they were some four hundred feet above the water and about a mile astern. They flew up past her, less than a hundred yards off her port side, and he could see everything quite clearly.

  Her hull was painted a light blue now, instead of white, and while he couldn’t make out the name lettered on her stern it was shorter than Dragoon. She lay roughly on a northerly heading about three hundred yards southwest of the dry sand bar, which was itself approximately that long, very narrow, and not over two or three feet above water at its highest point. The water was very shoal on all sides of the bar except for one twisting channel of slightly darker blue extending along its western side, past the Dragoon’s stern, and then on westward toward the outer edge of the Bank. The tide was flooding onto the Bank, flowing around her hull, but she lay broadside to it and unmoving. The deck was empty of any sign of life. Then they were past her, and Avery was climbing to gain altitude for another turn.

  Mrs. Osborne had put down the binoculars and had her face pressed against the window, trying to see aft. “Are you sure it’s the Dragoon?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “There’s no doubt of it.”

  “There’s something funny about the way she’s lying. What is it?”

  “She’s aground.”

  “I didn’t see anybody. Did you?”

  “No. I think she’s been abandoned.”

  “There must be somebody. . . . What could have happened?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Avery completed the turn and they came back, still lower and off the schooner’s starboard side this time. She was in no immediate danger, Ingram thought, as long as the wind held out of the southeast. There was a short, choppy sea running across the Bank, but she was completely protected in the lee of the shoal surrounding the sand spit. A norther would break her up, but there was little chance of one in June. As they went past he swept the deserted deck with a cool professional eye. There appeared to be no damage. The sticks and rigging were all right as far as he could tell. The sails were sloppily furled, as though they had been stowed in the dark by farmers, but the booms were inboard, the main resting on its gallows. There was only one thing that appeared to be amiss, and that was hard to judge with the list she had. She could be a little low in the water. Maybe she had been holed on a reef somewhere and they’d deliberately beached her. But there was no anchor out, which would seem to indicate she’d been abandoned before she went aground. It was baffling.

  Then they were past, and climbing. Ingram made an estimate of the position and marked it on the chart. Avery checked the time, and cautioned, “Can’t cut it too fine. We’d best start for home.”

  “Could we go by just once more?” Mrs. Osborne asked.

  Avery nodded. They made the turn and came back, higher this time. She stared down at the empty deck. Then the schooner was falling away behind them, looking helpless and forsaken in the lonely distances of the sea. When she disappeared at last, Mrs. Osborne turned away from the window. “How do we get aboard?”

  “Charter a boat,” Ingram replied.

  “How long will it take?”

  “Two days, at least. Maybe three.”

  “That’s too long. Why don’t we land out there with the plane?”

  He glanced at Avery. The latter nodded. “Could be done, if there’s not too much sea running. Early in the morning would be the best time. But you’d have to take it up with McAllister.”

  He started to point out that merely getting aboard wouldn’t solve anything; the chances were they were going to need the help of another boat, and one with plenty of power, to pull her off. Then he reconsidered; there were several things in favor of it. He could size up the situation at first hand, see just what it was going to take to get her afloat again, and find out if there was any damage below the water line. Also, she might not be fast aground at all; she might merely have lodged there on a change of tide and float off herself on the next flood. With no anchor out, there was no telling where she would wind up. An abandoned boat was always in danger.

  “What about getting over to her?” he asked.

  “We have some rubber life rafts,” Avery replied.

  They landed in Nassau shortly before six. McAllister was still in the office. He was a portly Irishman with curly black hair, a cigar, and the affable charm of a successful politician. Ingram unrolled the chart on his desk and explained the situation.

  “You’re sure that’s the position?” McAllister asked. “The chart doesn’t show a sand bar there.”

  “I know,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything. A lot of the Bank’s pretty sketchy in the survey department, and those shoals and bars change with every storm. We checked the course on the way in, and wouldn’t have any trouble finding it again.”

  “Any rocks or coral heads close to the surface?”

  Avery shook his head. “No. There’s plenty of water to the westward of the sand spit. Early in the morning, before the breeze gets up, we could bring her in well off the shoal and taxi up in the lee of it while they go aboard.”

  “Okay,” McAllister replied. “If it looks safe to you. What time do you want to take off?”

  “The earlier the better. As soon as it’s light.”

  “All right. We’ll put one of those surplus life rafts aboard and have her ready.”

  Ingram retrieved their suitcases and they went around in front of the terminal and took a taxi downtown. As they pulled away from the loading zone, she asked, “What do you think happened? What became of them?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You don’t think there’s a chance anyone is still aboard?”

  “No. They’d have made some attempt to get her off. There would have been a kedge anchor out astern, or some roily water downstream if they’d been turning the engine. She was apparently abandoned even before she drifted in there.”

  “But how? And why?”

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t even try to guess. There’s been no bad weather, and I didn’t see any sign of damage. Hollister couldn’t have taken her down there alone. There had to be others. And as far as we know, they didn’t even have another dinghy to get off with even if they’d wanted to. It makes no sense at all.”

  “But what about Hollister?”

  “There’s a good chance he’s dead.”

  It was a moment before she answered. “Why?”

  “He took off his clothes and that watch to go in the water after something. He didn’t come back into the dinghy. And if he’s not aboard the Dragoon, that doesn’t leave much.”

  “I see,” she said. He turned and glanced at her, but she was staring out the window on the opposite side. She was silent during the rest of the ride into town; when he suggested the Pilot House Club as a good place to stay, she merely nodded. When they came into the central business district she asked the driver to stop, and got out.

  “I want to do some shopping,” she said to Ingram. “Take my suitcase and the binoculars, and reserve a room for me. I’ll be along later.”

  After he’d shaved and showered he ate a solitary dinner in the patio near the pool. He didn’t see her anywhere. He crossed the road to the Yacht Haven; none of the skippers he knew were around, so he walked downtown, driven by restlessness, and had several bottles of beer in the Carlton House bar. You’re getting old, he told himself; you’ve been too many places for too many fo
rgotten reasons, and now you’re going around again. Remembering the same place offset in different layers of time makes it too easy to count the years in between and wonder where they went. You wake up in the morning and they’re speaking Spanish outside your window, so it could be Mexico again, and you remember lightering bananas down the Grijalva River in a wheezy gasoline-powered tug with a string of cranky barges and the goofy invincibility of youth, and the salvage job off the Panuco River bar below Tampico when the tanker piled up on the south jetty because the skipper wouldn’t wait for a pilot and didn’t know about the bad southerly set across the entrance during a norther, and then you realize the two memories are eleven years apart and somehow they’ve shoved a whole war, several other countries, and a good deal of the western Pacific in between. And Nassau . . .

  That had been the good time. Seven years of it, with Frances and the Canción. He’d met Frances in 1948 when she’d been one of a party of five Miami schoolteachers who’d chartered the Canción for a week’s trip to Eleuthera. They were married that same year, and lived aboard the ketch as skipper and mate in a very special and private world of their own happiness while carrying charters along the New England coast in summer and around the Bahamas in winter—until 1955. She’d flown home to Seattle to visit her mother, and was going to drive back to Chicago with friends to take the plane down to Miami. Everything had seemed to run down and stop then, on that endless bright November afternoon in the Berry Islands with the wind blowing blue and clean from the north, when he got the word by radio. She’d been killed in an automobile accident at a place called Manhattan, Montana. While he stood there holding the handset of the radiotelephone in his hand waiting for the numbness to wear off and the thing to begin to get to him wherever it was going to start, it seemed the only thing he could think of was that if he could only isolate it and pin it down there must be a question in here somewhere for the boys who could always explain everything. After all the places he’d been in the world, the only thing he’d ever been handed that he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to handle had happened to him in a place he’d never even heard of.

  You’ve had too much beer, he thought, or you think too much when you drink. He left the bar and walked back, and it was after eleven when he came into the lobby of the Pilot House. The girl at the desk said Mrs. Osborne had tried to call him several times in the past hour. “Thank you,” he said. He went on up to his room, looked at the telephone, and shrugged. The hell with Mrs. Osborne; he was going to bed. While he was unbuttoning his shirt, the telephone rang. He ignored it until the third ring, when it occurred to him the girl would have told her he was in now. He picked it up.

  “I want to talk to you,” she said. Her voice sounded blurred, and the words tended to run together. “I was just going to bed.”

  “At eleven o’clock? Do you get a merit badge or something?”

  “Can’t it wait till morning?”

  “No. Come over to my room. Or I’ll come over there.”

  Stoned, he thought. He’d better humor her, or she’d be banging on the door. “All right.” He put the instrument back on the cradle and went down the hall.

  4

  The door was ajar. When he knocked, she called out, “Come on in.” He stepped inside. She had on a blue dressing gown and was sitting on the studio couch with her stockinged feet stretched out on the coffee table in front of it. Beside her feet there were a bottle of Bacardi about two-thirds full, two or three opened bottles of Coca-Cola, a pitcher of ice, and a paperback mystery novel. She had a glass in her hand.

  She regarded him solemnly, and sniffed. “It’s all right to close the door. You can always scream.”

  He was aware for the first time that she had a definite southern accent. Perhaps he’d heard it before but it just hadn’t registered; he was a Texan too, and, although he’d been away so long that he’d lost all trace of it himself, he didn’t always notice it in others when he heard it. She didn’t appear to be outstandingly drunk, aside from the solemnity. The flamboyant mop of tawny hair was all in place, and her mouth nicely made up. But you never knew. There might possibly be other things in the world more unpredictable than a woman with too much to drink, but he’d never run into any of them. He wondered, without caring particularly, if she hit it this hard all the time. It’d be a shame. She was still a fine figure of a woman, but she must be between thirty and thirty-five, and at that age they didn’t stay in there long against the sauce without being marked.

  “You don’t have to look so smug,” she said. “I’m perfectly aware of it.”

  “What?”

  “That my feet are on the coffee table.”

  “Los pies de la Señora Osborne están en la mesa,” he said, with a parrot-like intonation.

  She frowned. “What’s that mean?”

  “The feet of Mrs. Osborne are on the table. I don’t know—it just sounded like one of those phrase-book deals. Would it be all right if we talked about your feet in the morning?”

  “Captain, I have a feeling that you don’t entirely approve of me. Do you?”

  “I hadn’t given it any thought,” he said. “Does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters. Don’t you realize I might slash my wrists?”

  He said nothing, wondering if two adults could get into a more asinine conversation. She probably wasn’t drunk enough to throw things, so maybe after she got a little of it out of her system, whatever it was, he could leave without starting a scene that would bring down the hotel. There seemed no point in even trying to guess what had brought it on. It was possible, of course, that he’d muffed the cue back there when she’d asked him to register for them, though that was pretty farfetched; if she’d wanted to indulge in a little away-from-home affair, she was certainly attractive enough to do better. There were plenty of younger and more personable men available in a place like Nassau. It was more probable, if that were the case, that she’d merely expected him to make the bid so she could turn it down. In any event, it hadn’t even occurred to him, so maybe he was getting old. Or, as she charged, he just didn’t like her. Well, he didn’t, particularly. Maybe that was the answer; she’d sensed it, and resented it—though he couldn’t imagine why. With those green eyes and that high-cheekboned and suggestively arrogant face she didn’t strike you as somebody who normally bled a great deal over the opinions of the rabble.

  She was apparently lost in thought; maybe she’d forgotten he was there.

  “What did you want to see me about?” he asked.

  She poured some more rum in the glass. “Hollister.”

  His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “What about him?”

  “I wanted to ask you something. When he was giving you this snow job, did he ever say anything about being a doctor?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Just this moonshine about being president of a drug firm? Well, it is in the pattern, at that.”

  He began to have the feeling now that she wasn’t as drunk as she appeared. She was faking it. “What are you talking about?”

  “Still that same old medical angle,” she mused, as if speaking to herself. “His mother must have been frightened by a pregnancy test.”

  “You know him, don’t you?”

  “Who says I do?”

  “You spent over a thousand dollars today just to fly over the Dragoon with a pair of binoculars, looking for him.”

  “Maybe I was trying to find out.”

  “Who do you think he was?”

  “It’s nothing to you.”

  “No, but it might be to the police. Or had you thought of that?”

  “Never mind the police. If I have to go out and recover my own boat, they can look after themselves. I tell you I don’t know, anyway. I’m just guessing.”

  “Did he have a watch like that?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But that’s no real proof. They’re not too common, but still there are others.” />
  “What about the description I gave you?”

  “It could fit him. Along with a lot of other men. There’s another thing, though, that’s more important. You must have wondered why he wanted somebody else to survey the boat instead of going himself.”

  “Sure.”

  “He couldn’t have gone himself because Tango would know him. He’d been aboard the Dragoon before.”

  He nodded. “That would make sense. But what would he want to steal it for?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Who was he?”

  “He’s just a man I used to know. His name’s Patrick Ives. That is, if all these guesses are right.”

  “Did he know anything about sailing?”

  “A little, I think. I know he’s sailed small boats.”

  “Do you think he could have handled the Dragoon—with help, I mean? She’s a little out of the plaything class.”

  “That I couldn’t judge; I don’t know enough about it myself. He did know navigation, though; he was a B-17 navigator during the Second World War.”

  “He was just asking for trouble if he didn’t know how to handle a boat that size.”

  “Well, he seems to have found it, judging from where the Dragoon is now. Do you really think he’s dead?”

  Ingram nodded. “Naturally, there’s no way to be sure, but I think he drowned.”

  She looked down at her glass. “I suppose so.”

  “Was he a doctor?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, without looking up. “He was a phony. He liked to pass himself off as a doctor when he was cashing rubber checks.”

  He nodded. “That sounds like him. I’ve got one of his checks.”

  “Well, it’s no collector’s item.”

  “You don’t have any idea at all why he would steal the boat?”